Brooklyn Girl Is Found Safe In Woods in Massachusetts

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Displaying survival skills that impressed local people familiar with the outdoors, a 14-year-old Hasidic girl from Brooklyn who disappeared on Wednesday when a school outing in a Connecticut state park went awry was found today by the police in dense, swampy woods, frightened and tired but praying by the side of a tree.

Suri Feldman had carefully rationed her sandwiches so that they sustained her for the two days and two nights she was lost. She found ledges to keep her dry during occasional drizzles. When search helicopters flew overhead, she tried to signal them with the flash on her camera.

"We were concerned that this was a city girl with no survival skills at all," said Chief Kevin Fitzgibbons of the Sturbridge Police Department. "But speaking to her I have nothing but absolute amazement for the girl."

The thin, slight teen-ager had wandered along forest roads more than three miles from the point in Bigelow Hollow State Park where she became separated from her classmates. She was still a mile and half from the nearest human outpost, the Sturbridge town dump and recycling center.

The six Southbridge, Mass., police officers who found her took her by ambulance to a local hospital, where doctors said she had suffered minor dehydration and scratches. They pronounced her fit enough to travel home in an ambulance, three and a half hours to Brooklyn, and perhaps arrive before the onset of the Sabbath.

Suri returned to Brooklyn tonight amid the wailing sirens of a police escort and the cheers of more than 300 admirers, most of them Hasidim. She smiled broadly as she was carried, lying on a gurney, through the doors of Maimonides Medical Center on 10th Avenue in Borough Park.

Dr. Fima Lifshitz, chairman of the department of pediatrics at Maimonides, said that Suri was in good condition and would be able to return home soon.

"We find she had a little bit of frost burn on her hands, very mild, and scratches and bites," Dr. Lifshitz said. 'An Amazing Job'

"She looked wonderful," said Trish Bourassa, the ambulance driver who picked her up from the woods in Massachusetts. "I hugged her and I said you're all right. I hugged her the whole time until we got to the hospital. She did an amazing job. Everybody deserves congratulations, but most goes to her."

The first thing Miss Feldman wanted to know when she was found was whether the police would take her home to Brooklyn. When she learned that she was the object of a massive search and that her photograph was on the front page of newspapers, she asked to see a newspaper.

At Harrington Memorial Hospital in Southbridge, she was reunited with her father, Ernest Feldman.

"I can't remember the first thing I said when I saw her," Mr. Feldman told reporters later. "I was too excited. But when I heard I just said, 'Thank God.' I am a pessimist. I don't believe in miracles but I do believe in God."

When reporters asked what kind of sandwiches his daughter had eaten, he replied, "One thing I can tell you for sure, she didn't have any ham sandwiches." Jubilation in Brooklyn

News that she was alive and well set off jubilation in her neighborhood in Brooklyn and by the mixture of black-suited and bearded Hasidim and local volunteers who had searched the woods for her. At a firehouse that was the command center for the search, the Hasidim began dancing in a circle, holding high an umbrella-shielded Torah that they had brought in case they had to stay in the area during the Sabbath.

"I cannot pay the community for what they've done," her father said later. "But hopefully God will repay them."

The searchers, more than 1,000 according to the police, had picked up clues -- an empty container of kosher vanilla pudding, a fresh tissue -- that Suri was alive and in the woods rather than the victim of violence. But on their minds was the case of a 12-year-old girl, Holly Piirainen, who disappeared in August in an adjacent town and was found murdered in the woods. With each passing hour, and with predictions of heavy rain, they grew more despairing.

Suri told the officers who found her that she had refrained from shouting for help because she was worried she might attract "bad people." A Walk in the Woods

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Miss Feldman was part of a group of 237 girls and their teachers from Tomer Devorah High School in Borough Park taking a trip to Old Sturbridge Village, a recreation of an 18th century farming village, and decided on Wednesday to stop for a walk in the woods.

The two-hour stop quickly went awry, with many students becoming lost in the woods. Two girls made their way to a road, where a motorist drove them back to the park. Another group returned to the bus two hours after they were expected. Suri, who was carrying a lunch, was the only one who did not return.

School officials today repeated that the students had been properly supervised by the 12 chaperones with them, adding that older girls had been paired with younger ones.

"Two hundred of them did not get lost," Rabbi Shlomo Kolodny, the school's director, said. "That's good organization."

The search attracted more than 600 Hasidim from as far away as Montreal and Washington, bringing truckloads of kosher food that they shared with non-Jewish volunteers. "It says in the Bible that to save a life is to save the entire world," said Isaac Fortgang of Boston, explaining why he traveled so far to help.

They joined scores of local and state police officers and hundreds of volunteers like James Carlson, a 25-year-old security guard and father of a 6-year-old girl, who scoured the woods each night after work. "I look at it this way," he said. "If it were my daughter and she was missing, I'd want everybody to help me."

Searchers mapped out grids for different groups to explore, and this morning one group of police officers found a fresh footprint near a swamp on the border between Sturbridge and Southbridge. Southbridge Police Officer John Mulcahy then noticed a road not shown on any of his maps and headed down it with his colleagues. Within 500 yards, they spotted Miss Feldman at 10:34 A.M. at the side of a tree. He told reporters that he called for her but she did not answer because she was praying.

Miss Feldman, who is not quite five feet tall, was wearing the same clothes as when she became lost: a blue plaid shirt decorated with pink flowers, a long blue skirt and a windbreaker. Officer Mulcahy said that her first words to them were: "Are you taking me back to Brooklyn?" Scared Most of the Time

She told her rescuers that she walked the paths of the state park and the surrounding forest during the day and stayed in one place at night, pulling her windbreaker tight to keep warm. She did not remember sleeping and said she was scared most of the time.

"She looked wonderful," said Ms. Bourassa. "She was standing and she had a little smile on her face."

One police officer put a police cap on her head. Miss Feldman was brought out of the woods in a four-wheel drive vehicle and taken to Ms. Bourassa's ambulance, and in that was driven to Harrington Hospital. There Dr. Rose Tharakian, a pediatrician, said, "The fact that she was well provided for with food and a jacket helped."

Doctors wanted to keep Miss Feldman overnight at the hospital for observation, but Mr. Feldman was eager to take her home and persuaded the hospital to let her go after less than six hours.

Mr. Feldman, who said he makes his living in real estate and has 14 children, said he called his wife to tell her of the discovery.

"When she heard I was holding her, it made her day," he said.

At the Feldman home at 1668 54th Street in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, neighbors had hung an orange banner inscribed with Hebrew letters.

"Say praise to God, for His goodness is for always," Moishe Feldman, Suri's brother, translated.

A version of this article appears in print on May 7, 1994, on Page 1001001 of the National edition with the headline: Brooklyn Girl Is Found Safe In Woods in Massachusetts. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe